"Richard O'Keefe" <o...@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote: > On 21 Apr 2009, at 11:36 pm, Achim Schneider wrote: > > > "Richard O'Keefe" <o...@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote: > > > >> Some of the right questions are > >> - how many potential <whatever> users would need to have > >> <whatever> installed on _some_ machine they do NOT have > >> administrator access to? > >> > > Irrelevant. > > How van the question that is the very heart of this thread > be "irrelevant"? > > This is precisely the situation I'm in, and it's precisely > the class of users I'm arguing for. > > I'm encouraged by the constructive suggestions of package > tools (nix, portage) that are said to address some of these > issues. Except of course that I have to install them first... > It's irrelevant, because I _do_ have root access to my machine, but don't want to get forced into using it by a question that implies that if you have access, you're going to use it. I didn't mean to nit pick, though, I thought you were arguing for the other side...
I think the right question is "how many people prefer user installs over system installs, wrt. their hackage packages?". I estimate that, concerning developers, who are used to install still-buggy, self-written libraries, as well as install things while working, the percentage is very, very high: At least I don't want my workflow to be broken to deal with the formal requirements of a global install while developing, and I guess many others feel the same way.[1] Endusers, of course, might have other preferences, but cabal doesn't (IMHO) cater to them, directly: It caters to distribution packages (or windows installers, or whatever), so cabal's default behaviour is quite irrelevant for those cases. [1] Thinking of it... is there a way to tell cabal to pretend a package is installed by giving the path to it's source directory? Just like include directories, but with packages. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe